In this week's Field Notes edition of The Adoption Curve, we explore why some L&D and enablement teams get pulled into strategy early, and others spend years executing requests they never got to shape.
The gap is rarely a skills gap. It is a positioning gap.
This edition examines how learning and enablement teams move from reactive delivery to proactive partnership by changing how they respond to requests, when they get involved, and what they use to decide what's worth their time.
What you'll learn
- Why "order-taker" is a structural position, not a skill gap
- The maturity journey from reactive delivery to strategic partnership
- How to build the habits that make the shift stick, and how to know it's working
About Field Notes
Each week, we speak with industry experts and iorad users around the world to understand how they're solving challenges in Enablement and L&D. We share those stories through The Adoption Curve.
But across those conversations, patterns have started to emerge.
Field Notes is where we capture them: distilling insights from interviews, customer feedback, and real-world experience into the trends that matter most.
From Order-Taker to Strategic Partner
Being good at your job is not the same as being trusted with the business's problems.
Every L&D and enablement team eventually runs into the same wall: they deliver what's asked, on time, at a high standard, and still get looped in after the decisions that actually mattered were already made. The instinct is to blame budget, or an unsympathetic executive.
So this Field Notes edition tackles something foundational:
- Why does order-taking happen even to good teams?
- What does the path out of it actually look like, stage by stage?
- What does a strategic partnership look like once you're there?
- And how do you know the shift is real, and not just a feeling?
If you're responsible for earning trust with the business, this matters deeply. Because the difference between a team that gets consulted and a team that gets handed finished requests often comes down to one thing:
Timing.
Why Order-Taking Happens Even to Good Teams
In one of our conversations, Megan Torrance, CEO of TorranceLearning, named the mechanism directly:
"When you're a low-power person, how do you make other people like you? You do whatever it is they ask you to do... Over time that builds a dynamic, and we've kind of built ourselves into that spot.”
— Megan Torrance
That example is personal, but it is not unusual.
The pattern shows up across nearly every learning and enablement team we've talked to: saying yes to every request, every time, is what trains the rest of the organization to treat the team as a vendor instead of a partner. Nobody sits down and decides to be reactive. It accumulates one accommodating "yes" at a time.
The intent is good. The dynamic is fragile.
Once that pattern sets, it repeats itself. Requests arrive fully formed. The learning team's job becomes execution, not input. And the later the team gets looped in, the less room there is to ask whether training was even the right fix.
The problem is not effort. The problem is that the relationship was never designed to include the team early.
The Maturity Curve: From Compliance to Anticipation
David James's L&D maturity model gives this pattern a shape. Most teams do not intentionally design their way out of order-taking. They evolve through it, and that evolution tends to move through four stages.
The first stage is reactive. There's very little here except compliance — training exists to keep the organization out of legal or regulatory trouble, and beyond that it's a free-for-all. People book training when they personally need it. There's no destination, just a constant stream of "have we got something on this?"
This model works when an organization is small or a program is young. But it creates a ceiling fast. Every request resets the clock. Knowledge lives in people, not in systems.
The second stage is proactive — the "one-stop shop." The team builds a course catalog, a platform, generic content anyone can self-serve. This is real progress. But it's still a shopfront: it's designed without knowing the business's actual problems, so the team starts reaching out to business leaders just to get face time and understand what's really going on.
Access alone does not create trust. It creates an invitation to earn it.
The third stage is strategic, and it's the one every other guest in this edition described in their own words. This is where access turns into influence.
"This is where you go from a visible order taker into somebody who looks to align with what the organization's trying to do. So instead of taking the order, you'll be asking those consultative questions." — David James
Those consultative questions are specific:
- What are you actually trying to achieve?
- What's the status quo?
- How should things be working?
- What would the consequences be of doing nothing?
That last question does the real work. It forces the requester to justify the ask in business terms, not training terms. Sometimes the answer reveals training was never the fix. Sometimes it confirms the request was right, but now the team knows why — which changes how they scope it and what they measure afterward.
The fourth stage is anticipatory. Instead of responding to the business strategy, the team works ahead of it — every role mapped to the skills it needs, updated dynamically as the business changes. Few teams operate here consistently. But every team in this edition was, in some form, working to get out of stage one and into stage three.
What Strategic Partnership Actually Looks Like
Becky Willis's team put a name on the third stage: performance consulting.
It has three defining habits.
First, the request gets reframed before it gets fulfilled. When a stakeholder asked Willis's team for training, the first move wasn't scoping a course — it was understanding the business problem underneath the ask. Early in her career, IT wanted a 30-minute phishing course. Comprehensive, detailed, and by her own account, boring. Instead of building it as specified, she proposed a test: one group got the 30-minute course as requested, another got a five-minute animated video her team made instead. The video won. The actual goal was never "deliver 30 minutes of content." It was "stop people from clicking phishing links" — and once that was the real target, a shorter asset beat the original spec.
Second, the team shows up before the request exists, not after. By the time a project lands on a learning team's desk as "we need training," the timeline, scope, and success metrics are usually already decided. Megan Torrance's answer was to push early: an internal "roadshow," going to other departments and offering herself as a resource before they came asking. Willis's answer was to pull early — she built enough credibility over time that project leads started asking for her input before a vendor was even chosen.
Either version beats showing up after the decision is locked.
Third, the team reports in the business's language, not their own. Most L&D teams report activity: completions, attendance, satisfaction scores. Executives think in outcomes: revenue, retention, risk. Willis closed that gap the unglamorous way: monthly conversations with someone in Finance, just to learn how leadership actually talked about budget and results. She calls it "Finance 101 for Becky." It cost an hour a month and changed how every pitch after it landed.
Without these three habits, even the best content fails to earn a different kind of trust.
How Do You Know It's Working?
This is where teams often default to the wrong signals — feeling more respected, or getting nicer meetings, instead of anything checkable.
Tara Medeiros, Vice President of Sales Enablement at PTC, ran into the sharper version of this problem: a capable team, constant activity, no shared definition of what actually mattered. Decisions got made by committee, and the loudest stakeholder in the room usually won.
Her fix wasn't doing more. It was a scoring framework her leadership team used every quarter to decide what to say yes to, and what to confidently decline. It was scored against three things: business impact (does this map to a stated company priority, or is it just a nice-to-have), performance (will enablement actually move the needle, or is this really a process problem wearing a training costume), and enablement leverage (is this a one-off, or something repeatable at scale).
None of that unlocked more budget or headcount. What it unlocked was the ability to have the trade-off conversation out loud instead of absorbing every request silently.
If your shift toward partnership is real, you should see it in specific business behavior, not sentiment:
- Requests arrive as business problems ("pipeline is soft"), not finished solutions ("build us a course")
- You're asked for input before a tool or process decision, not after
- Your reporting shifts from participation metrics to the outcome metrics leadership already tracks
- You can say no to a request that doesn't map to a priority, and it holds
- Stakeholders describe looping you in early, not handing things off to you
That is not a better feeling in the room. That is a different position in the organization.
The Cultural Shift Required
Better frameworks alone will not fix this.
Habits will.
The team has to normalize a new default: ask the business question before scoping the request, not after. Report the metric leadership already tracks, not the one that's easiest to pull. Say no to a request that doesn't map to a stated priority, and mean it.
And the organization has to reinforce it. If a team keeps saying yes to everything just to stay liked, the pattern never breaks. The low-power dynamic just repeats itself in a new quarter.
The identity shift is the hardest part.
Learning and enablement teams are not in the business of taking every order well. They are in the business of knowing which orders are worth taking, and asking the right question before they do.
That is the shift from order-taker to strategic partner.
The Tactical Starting Point
If you want to start this tomorrow, don't try to redesign the whole relationship at once.
- Pull your last 10 requests. How many arrived as a solution ("build training") versus a problem ("reps are missing quota")? A high solutions-in ratio means you're being handed tactics, not invited into strategy.
- Pull your last 3 reports to leadership. Count activity-based metrics (completions, attendance) against outcome-based ones (time-to-competency, error rate, revenue).
- Map your last 3 projects. Note when your team was looped in relative to when the tool or process decision was made.
- Pick one relationship to build outside L&D. Finance, Ops, a business unit lead, etc.
- Pick one live request, and ask the business question underneath it before you scope anything.
Do not try to fix your entire intake process at once. Pick one relationship. One request. One report. Prove the shift works there, and then scale it.
If your team is still executing every request exactly as written, you have not built a strategic function. You have built a very efficient order desk.
The teams that earn a seat at the table will not be the ones that deliver the fastest.
They will be the ones who ask the best question before they start.